Below is a guest post written by Ryan Sipes, Community Manager at System76

Last week System76 engineers participated in a call with Martin Wimpress of the Ubuntu Desktop team to discuss HiDPI support in Ubuntu, specifically Unity 7. HiDPI support exists in Unity 7, but there are areas that could use improvement, and the call ...

Recently the ubuntu-app-platform snap has been made available in the store for application developers to build their snaps without bundling all their dependencies. The ubuntu-app-platform snap includes standard Qt libraries (version 5.6.1 as of this writing) and QML runtime, the ubuntu UI toolkit and related dependencies, and oxide (a web engine based on ...

Everyone who has followed Ubuntu lately for sure stumbled across the snappy technology, which does not only bring the new cross-distro packaging format “snap” but also a sandboxing technology for apps, as well as transactional updates that can be rolled back in case of an update going wrong and a new way of installing and ...

Introduction

One of the advantages of snap packages is that they are self-contained. When you install a snap, you know that you don’t need to install additional dependencies (besides the automatically-installed core snap that provides the basic operating system layer), and it will simply work on every Linux distribution that supports snaps.

I always felt that learning something new, especially new concepts and workflows usually works best if you see it first-hand and get to do things yourself. If you experience directly how your actions influence the system you're working with, the new connections in your brain form much more quickly. Didier and I talked ...

In the Webapps team at Canonical, we are always looking to make sure that web and near-web technologies are available to developers. We want to make everyone's life easier, enable the use of tools that are familiar to web developers and provide an easy path to using them on the Ubuntu platform.

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Background

Integrating desktop applications with snaps has been a little bit challenging in terms of getting them looking and behaving as part of the system. This means following general desktop theming, having global application menu integration, getting the icon caches, getting configuration keys and such. Also, the technologies and toolkits like GTK, Qt, demand a little bit of expertise on ...